The Halo eBook

She had chosen her moment well, and as the door faced
a long mirror between the windows she saw, as she
stood on the threshold, not only Joyselle, who, alone
in the room, stood staring in amazement, but also
that at which he stared—­herself. Clad
in a dress made apparently entirely of flexible dull
gold scales, the long lines of her figure unbroken
by any belt or trimming, the woman in the glass stood
smiling like a witch of old, a deep colour in her
cheeks, the palms of her hands held down by her side,
the fingers outspread and slightly lifted as if in
water. Quite silently she stood and smiled until
the man before her dropped his violin—­for
the first time, she knew instinctively, in his life.

Then she spoke, saying his name, the name by which
the world knew him: “Joyselle.”

“Mon Dieu!” he returned softly.
Coming slowly forward he caught her hand with clumsy
haste and kissed it. Her heart stopped its mad
beating, for she had won. Here was no Beau-papa.
Here was the man, Victor Joyselle.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I did not know you,” he said. “I
thought—­juste ciel, how do I know
what I thought? You are so beautiful, I——­”

She laughed gently. “Beau-papa! Beau-papa!
Where is Theo?”

For she knew now that she would not break her engagement
to-night. The end was not yet. And by the
strange laws that govern things emotional between
men and women, her self-control, hitherto utterly lamed
by his presence, was now, in face of his involuntary,
as yet evidently unconscious awakening, restored to
her tenfold strong. She could have spent weeks
alone with the man without betraying her secret, now
that she had established her power over him.
It had been his acceptance of the fact of her future
relationship to him, his unexpressed feeling that
she was a being of another generation, his tacit refusal
to see in her the woman per se, that had beaten
her. Now she had, by the plain assertion of her
beauty, the enforcing of the appreciation of it as
a thing appertaining to her as a woman, not a daughter,
got the reins—­and the whip—­into
her own hands.

“Where,” she repeated, still smiling,
“is Theo?”

“He is in his room; he will come—­ah,
mon Dieu!” Kneeling by his violin, which
luckily had fallen on a bearskin, he took it up and
looked at it shamefacedly. “See what you
made me do,” he said to Brigit, “you and
your golden dress! Mon pauvre Amati.”

She continued to look at him in silence, her instinct
telling her that the strange smile she had seen on
the face of the woman in the glass could not be beaten
for purposes of subjugation. She continued to
look and smile, but she was sorry for him, even while
every fibre in her thrilled with triumph.

He realised her now; if she wanted him to love her,
he would.

“Will you call Theo?” she asked as he
rose. Without a word he left the room, and a
few moments later Theo’s arms were around her,
his fresh lips on hers.